Exercise and fitness have become increasingly popular and the benefits from such activities are well known. Various types of technology have been incorporated into fitness and other athletic activities. For example, a wide variety of portable electronic devices are available for use in fitness activity such as MP3 or other audio players, radios, portable televisions, DVD players, or other video playing devices, watches, GPS systems, pedometers, mobile telephones, pagers, beepers, etc. Many fitness enthusiasts or athletes use one or more of these devices when exercising or training to keep them entertained, record and provide performance data or to keep them in contact with others, etc.
Advances in technology have also provided more sophisticated athletic performance monitoring systems. Athletic performance monitoring systems enable easy and convenient monitoring of many physical or physiological characteristics associated with exercise and fitness activity, or other athletic performances including, for example, speed and distance data, altitude data, GPS data, heart rate, pulse rate, blood pressure data, body temperature, steps taken etc. This data can be provided to a user through a portable electronic device carried by the user. For example, one athletic performance monitoring system may incorporate an audio player wherein data can be incorporated for display or further communication on the audio player. Other systems may have a device having its own display or the ability to display information on a separate mobile device such as a smartphone. While athletic performance monitoring systems according to the prior art provide a number of advantageous features, they nevertheless have certain limitations. For example, some users prefer not to use a portable audio player or prefer to obtain and display performance data separately from an audio player. Other athletic performance monitoring systems have limited ability to further upload data to a personal computer or other location for further review and consideration, or such data transfer is cumbersome for the user. Still other systems can only monitor a single type of athletic activity and cannot record the accumulation of various types of activity during a day or predetermined time period. Other systems also do not offer sufficient and creative feedback regarding the activity recorded and monitored. The present invention seeks to overcome certain of these limitations and other drawbacks of the prior art, and to provide new features not heretofore available.
A full discussion of the features and advantages of the present invention is referred to in the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.